Doubtless the Doctor felt as much pleasure at the meed awarded to his old companion in misery as at the high compliment to himself.  Anyhow he pronounced that Sheridan ‘had written the two best comedies of his age,’ and therefore proposed him as a member of the Literary Club.

This celebrated gathering of wit and whimsicality, founded by Johnson himself in conjunction with Sir J. Reynolds, was the Helicon of London Letters, and the temple which the greatest talker of his age had built for himself, and in which he took care to be duly worshipped.  It met at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street, Soho, every Friday; and from seven in the evening to almost any hour of night was the scene of such talk, mainly on literature and learning, as has never been heard since in this country.  It consisted at this period of twenty-six members, and there is scarcely one among them whose name is not known to-day as well as any in the history of our literature.  Besides the high priests, Reynolds and Johnson, there came Edmund Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and many another of less note, to represent the senate:  Goldsmith, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Malone, Dr. Burney, Percy, Nugent, Sir William Jones, three Irish bishops, and a host of others, crowded in from the ranks of learning and literature.  Garrick and George Colman found here an indulgent audience; and the light portion of the company comprised such men as Topham Beauclerk, Bennet Langton, Vesey, and a dozen of lords and baronets.  In short, they were picked men, and if their conversation was not always witty, it was because they had all wit and frightened one another.

[Illustration:  THE FAMOUS LITERARY CLUB.]

Among them the bullying Doctor rolled in majestic grumpiness; scolded, dogmatized, contradicted, pished and pshawed; and made himself generally disagreeable; yet, hail the omen, Intellect! such was the force, such the fame of his mind, that the more he snorted, the more they adored him—­the more he bullied, the more humbly they knocked under.  He was quite ‘His Majesty’ at the Turk’s Head, and the courtiers waited for his coming with anxiety, and talked of him till he came in the same manner as the lacqueys in the anteroom of a crowned monarch.  Boswell, who, by the way, was also a member—­of course he was, or how should we have had the great man’s conversations handed down to us?—­was sure to keep them up to the proper mark of adulation if they ever flagged in it, and was as servile in his admiration in the Doctor’s absence as when he was there to call him a fool for his pains.

Thus, on one occasion while ‘King Johnson’ tarried, the courtiers were discussing his journey to the Hebrides and his coming away ’willing to believe the second sight.’  Some of them smiled at this, but Bozzy was down on them with more than usual servility.  ’He is only willing to believe,’ he exclaimed. ’I do believe.  The evidence is enough for me, though not for his great mind.  What will not fill a quart bottle will fill a pint bottle.  I am filled with belief.’—­’Are you?’ said Colman, slily; ‘then cork it up.’